| Take Roots and Add Diamonds - A Sparkling Novel of Racial Identity and
Civil War in Sierra Leone
April 03, 2007
Link: http://www.mmdnewswire.com/content/view/1496/5/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS RELEASE
Contact: Victor Gulotta, 617-630-9286, victor@booktours.comThis email
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Eugene Harkins is Available for Interviews
Take Roots and Add Diamonds
A Sparkling Novel of Racial Identity and Civil War in Sierra Leone
What does it take for a man to be satisfied?
Richard White, extraordinarily accomplished by almost any measure,
would seem to have it all. Athletic, handsome, and very comfortably
rich, the erudite, 43-year-old managing partner of his own
international law firm speaks four languages and knows more about wine
than most sommeliers. And he comes from a very old family.
Unfortunately, they were slaves. White is an African-American who's
spent most of his life focusing on the American part and putting as
much distance behind him and the African part as possible. But it's
all about to catch up with him. And in the most unlikely of places:
the tiny nation of Sierra Leone, on the West Coast of Africa.
Where Witch Birds Fly. A heartbreakingly beautiful novel set in the
twilight of the Cold War
Eugene Harkins' Where Witch Birds Fly (Clarity Press, $14.95) takes
Richard White—and us—into the languorous, semi-surreal world of
post-colonial Africa. It's 1985. The British are gone, as are the
French, the Spanish, and the Portuguese before them. Now it's the
Lebanese ruling the commercial roost making fortunes off Sierra
Leone's storied diamond reserves.
When Richard White is sent to Sierra Leone on behalf of his client,
Mobil Oil, to collect a $40 million debt, he falls into a rabbit hole
of corruption, Big Diamonds, and bizarre cold-war politics that soon
has White sipping cocktails and playing volleyball with ambassadors
from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and almost every other rogue
nation on earth. (For centuries Russia has sought a warm, deepwater
natural harbor for its fleet. The harbor in Freetown, Sierra Leone's
capital, is ideal).
Harkins does a masterful job of evoking the sultry insouciance of the
expatriate and ambassadorial classes' bacchanals in protected country
clubs while the black masses are barely surviving. Sierra Leone is a
world of massive inequities caused by centuries of white
exploitation—much like a part of his home country, as White begins to
realize.
Harkins portrays with sensitivity and passion the deepening identity
crisis of his protagonist, catalyzed by his visit to Sa' L'one, as the
locals call it in their charming patois, which Harkins captures
beautifully. The people his protagonist meets while in Sierra Leone
are for the most part charming and innocent. But passivity finally
gives way to desperation and rage, and civil war explodes in March of
1991, tearing the country and its people apart for more than a decade.
The rebel's calling card—the wanton amputations of thousands of
innocent men, women and children—gained international notoriety,
ultimately resulting in the establishment of a UN War Crimes Tribunal.
Charles Taylor, the ex-president of Liberia, is slated to be tried
shortly in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity. It was Taylor who
is thought to have fomented the bloody civil war, profiting fabulously
from the trade in blood diamonds and armaments.
This is a compelling book, for the light it shines on black history
and for the skillful way the author depicts it in the life of an
extraordinary African-American man who has achieved remarkable success
in the white man's world, a world where even today no one is quite
sure whether calling a black man "articulate" is an insult or a
compliment.
Contact: Victor Gulotta, 617-630-9286, victor@booktours.comThis email
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# # #
Biography
Eugene Harkins is a lawyer and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers
College. He has a J.D. from Rutgers School of Law and an advanced
degree in international, foreign and comparative law from New York
University. He began his career with the State Department and then
served as staff attorney for Gulf Oil Company Latin America. A past
head of the International Law Department of Blackwell, Walker, Gray in
Miami, he also served as General Counsel for Texaco Latin America/West
Africa. Harkins has worked and traveled in some 65 countries and is
multi-lingual and multi-cultural.
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